Dances with defiance

(Los Angeles, U.S.A.)

Los Angeles: Rodney King, earthquakes, drugs gangs and the Oscars. For better or for worse, a city’s reputation is based on broad brushstrokes of history, and L.A. is no different. A visit to any city may leave us with fond memories, but for those who watch from afar it is the most unsavoury aspects of the city’s life which often attract more attention, and there is nothing more appealingly seedy than the annual bun-fight that is the Academy Awards Ceremony.

This year, like every year, there are clear favourites for most categories and films which promise to clean up, but there is one film which has only merited one nomination, slipping under the radar as easily as an Israeli plane over American-controlled territory. “Defiance” tells the tale of Jewish resistance and heroism in the Second World War, and was released to mixed reviews on New Year’s Eve of 2008.

WAR (FILM) – WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

In modern cinema, there are few things more pointless than spending two hours watching – not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars making – a film which attempts to glorify violence, especially that perpetrated by successive criminal Western governments in the name of some fallacious cause.

Inevitably, for a generation after the end of WW2, there were a plethora of such films, tales in which the men were men and the enemy was nervous. For the most part they were unashamedly chauvinist, phallocentric and stereotypical and served no greater purpose than to perpetuate the ridiculous myth that war is glorious and dying for your country an honour.

When the interest in WW2 films finally – thankfully – waned, it was replaced by films about the Vietnam War. Fortunately, people had also finally realised that wars started or continued by certain Western governments were no more than war crimes committed in the name of an arrogant belief in Western “civilisation”, and the films which dealt with Vietnam showed the war as futile, arrogant and flawed.

OUT OF THE BLUE

Recently we have been spared too many trashy American films glorifying Western atrocities committed in, for example, Afghanistan or Iraq, and there have obviously been only a handful of films glorifying WW2 during the last decade or so.

How strange then that there should suddenly appear a $32 million American film about the plight of the Jews – the first since “Schindler’s List” in 1993 – at a time when nobody else in the world of cinema seems to be interested in such ancient history. The massacre of Israelis in Munich, maybe, but WW2 is no longer in fashion.

A cynical interpretation of events would focus on the coincidence in the timing of the release of the film with the atrocious Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. How better to confuse the issue of these attacks by setting up the usual Israeli-American smokescreen of reminding the world once more of previous atrocities committed against the Jewish people.

SMOKE SIGNALS OR SMOKESCREEN?

This is not the first time American money has helped to create confusion around contemporary topics. Back in 1990, “Dances with wolves” was greeted as a sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans at a time when various peoples were struggling to retain the rights to their ancestral land and when the American authorities had successfully driven a wedge among them in the shape of gambling licences.

More recently, in 2007, the film “300” met with criticism for its extremely negative portrayal of the Persians – the people indigenous to the territory which is roughly now Iran – at a time when the American administration’s sword-rattling towards Tehran was at its loudest. In 2005 “Jarhead” showed an extremely pro-American view of the Iraq War when the Bush administration was coming under increasing pressure to justify the number of casualties among the armed forces (although not among Iraqi civilians, for some reason).

A POWERFUL TOOL

Cinema is a medium which enjoys instant worldwide acceptance and is in the enviable position of being able to reach a global audience with the simple yet effective communication of a message. There are times when cinema brings us films of protest and indignation about man’s inhumanity to man and shows that it is a force for good.

However, with power comes responsibility, and Hollywood would be wise not to promote any films which could be suspected of abusing that power. The eyes of the world are invariably focused on America, and now more than ever it is time for the more prominent American institutions to show integrity and transparency, two qualities which are notably absent from recent American foreign policy.